She is a woman, Black, the daughter of Haitian immigrants and a specialist in African-American studies. When Claudine Gay was chosen to become president of Harvard beginning on July 1, 2023, it was a revolution, a new progressive leap forward for America's oldest university, which boasts 25,000 students and 2,450 faculty members. It was a political statement, at a time when the Supreme Court, as all observers had realized, was preparing to declare affirmative action in student admissions unconstitutional.

Her term had barely begun when Hamas attacked Israel, on October 7, making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a major issue. Questioned by a Congressional committee on December 5 about anti-Semitic outbursts on campus, along with her counterparts from the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Elizabeth Magill, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sally Kornbluth, Claudine Gay, 53, was unable to give a clear answer to the question posed by Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik: "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment?"

"It can be, depending on the context," such as "targeted an individual," replied Gay, making the same point as her two colleagues.

Focused on defending their internal rules on freedom of expression, the three presidents remained riveted to the language prepared for them by legal experts. "It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign," said Stefanik, who began the hearing by equating calls for an intifada ("uprising" in Arabic) with committing "genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally." Her very personal definition, which went unchallenged at the hearing, shifted the debate from support for the intifada to the question of genocide.

The hearing has since been watched hundreds of millions of times, causing consternation. In a letter, 71 Republican representatives, joined by three Democrats, called for the resignation of the three presidents, while the White House disassociated itself from them. "It's unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country," said White house spokesperson Andrew Bates. President Joe Biden refrained from speaking out on the matter.

On Saturday, December 9, UPenn President Magill was forced to resign. "One down. Two to go," wrote Stefanik on X. "Harvard and MIT, do the right thing. The world is watching." In reality, at MIT, Kornbluth, who is Jewish and got less tangled up in the hearing than her colleagues, has already received the support of her board of trustees. At Harvard, resistance was being organized from within, to save icon-in-the-making Gay.

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